Ash Wednesday

Remember, man, that you are dust,and into dust you shall return.

The winter skies hang over Seattle, heavy and gray. The air is cold and damp. Rain may fall or, perhaps, drizzle may drizzle. And even when moisture doesn't fall to the ground, and down our necks, it still floats in the air, chilling us through our coats as we struggle through it. The wind blows hard against us, changing direction in gusts. The unlucky homeless huddle on the streets, their cardboard signs soggy, waiting hopelessly to be noticed.

Next week is Ash Wednesday. Not an American sort of holiday, is it? No happy families, gathered cozily about the dinner table. No decorations. No buying frenzies by crazed shoppers. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no displays of fireworks. Norman Rockwell never painted a family celebrating Ash Wednesday. It's a quiet day, a sober day, a day to be introspective. It is not a social observance. It's a time for us all to recall that our lives are not forever, that each of our lives had a finite beginning, and that each will have a finite end. An opportunity to consider what that unsettling fact must mean for us.

In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

--T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

And yet, un-American as Ash Wednesday may appear, Americans of all ages will stream into their churches next week to observe this most unfestive of days. We'll stand in the damp and chill of mid-winter, remembering who we are. Remembering that, seen in the context of the centuries and millennia of human history that precede us, our lives are brief and soon over. There was an Anglo-Saxon monk, a fellow named Bede, who pondered this brevity long ago. He wrote on ancient parchment that our lives reminded him of a tiny sparrow that flies out of the cold winter night, through a window, and into a warm, cheerful, brightly-lit banquet hall -- and then swiftly flies right out again, back into the dark.

In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter; but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to our eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man.

But we do not despair. Even now, even in these most depressing depths of winter, when all our world seems dead and lifeless, we note the first brave crocus buds forcing their way through the soil. The tiny crocuses, so easy to overlook, offer us hope; their appearance prefigures a new life to come. They serve as a sign to us of the approaching warmth, rebirth, growth and excitement of a new Spring.

We can certainly endure another six weeks or so of winter, can't we? In fact, if wise, we actually embrace the cold, the wet, the hardship. The sober darkness and silence we confront today, and in days to come, prepare us all the more fully for the infinite beauty of our promised Spring, in the same way as the agonizing absence of one's lover enhances the joy of the ultimate reunion.

We button our collars more securely, put our frozen hands into our pockets, and walk purposefully into the icy wind. We may crack a smile.

We may even whistle a little.